


Hope in the Hopeless

by hoteldestiel



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Loss, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:14:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22284679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoteldestiel/pseuds/hoteldestiel
Summary: Time Dwarf gets a sandwich. Eliot and Margo go camping.
Relationships: Margo Hanson/Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	Hope in the Hopeless

**Author's Note:**

> Post 5x01 grief-angst. This wouldn't leave me alone as I tried to fall asleep last night so. Here it is.

It took Eliot too long to realize that Margo was gone. To more accurately define “too long” in this particular fiasco: it took a slide to the center of the Earth, ham sandwich in hand to exchange for as many psychedelic Fillorian cave mushrooms as he could carry, a gloriously freeing trip that started somewhere around minute 45 of the slide back up to the surface, and a quiet, aching hollow that told him he needed more mushrooms to realize that Margo was gone. 

He weighed a mushroom in his hand, staring at it like it held answers to questions he was too chickenshit to ask, before he shoved it back in his pocket and pulled out his flask instead. "Bambi, you better be grateful for this," he muttered under his breath before throwing his head back and gulping greedily. After drinking until he coughed from the burn in his throat, he capped the flask and set off in the direction of the dungeons. It was the only place he could imagine her being. Even on Margo's most furious days, she'd never stayed angry at him this long.

Annoyed, frustrated, and terrifyingly close to sober, Eliot twisted his fingers expertly, blowing the guards at the front of the dungeons away without a second thought. They hit opposing walls like rag dolls and if they were unconscious or dead, he didn't really give a damn. 

"This is a little melodramatic, don't you think? Even for us," he mused when he found Margo, clinging to a drab piece of cloth on a cold, stone bench. 

"Get me the fuck out of here, would you?" Margo hissed, standing from the bench and meeting Eliot at the bars of her cell. 

Eliot knew Fillory wasn't really one for progress, but he thought maybe three centuries would have brought a little more advancement in the way of holding cells. He supposed he should be blessing the kingdom's ridiculous, archaic ways for making this so easy. He glanced up at her for the first time since her dramatic exit. There was a tension in Margo's brow, a tired, sad something in her eyes that hurt for Eliot to look too closely at. Hurt even more to think he might have caused it. 

"You sure you don't need a little more alone time?" Eliot sniped, already raising the ring of keys he'd levitated off one of the immobile guards. 

"I'm not alone, that's the fucking problem," Margo said, glancing back at the concrete bench. Another quip about fairy overlords being  _ so  _ 300 years ago danced on the tip of his tongue when a strange static filled the air in the cell and, with a few flickering spasms of light, there was Josh. 

_ Oh.  _

With haste he hadn't felt since returning to his body, he rushed forward, slotting the key into place and turning it, opening the gate and tugging Margo out by the wrist just as he heard Josh's worried, quiet voice echo.

_ Margo, wherever you are.  _

"Time for our grand exit," Eliot said, raising his voice to drown out whatever came next. He pretended not to feel the way Margo's shoulders shuddered under his arms as he led them out and hurried them away from the castle. 

They were settled somewhere in the Darkling Woods by the time the suns started to set. Margo started a fire with her fingers in record time and with impressively explosive results. Eliot tried not to think of what allowed that power. Eliot tried not to think of a lot of things. He stood from the log he was perched on and walked away from the roaring flames, turning to face the darkness of the wilds around him. He reached into his pocket and broke off a piece of mushroom, and quickly popped it into his mouth. 

Eliot didn't want to take away Margo's chance at happiness, not really. But she was all he had, now. He'd seen the pain on her face in that cell. Seen the toll it had taken on her. And here he was, cursing her for it. Cursing the fact that she'd been visited by the trauma ghost of about-to-be-beheaded Josh because it was  _ something.  _ It was more than he would ever see. 

"At least you get that," he wanted to say. 

He wanted to scream it, to shout until his throat was raw about how she had real memories, from this timeline. About how she had the opportunity to make the right choice, and she did. About how he would give anything including the pathetic, bourbon-washed excuse for a life he was drowning in now, to be visited by the ghost of Q. But that wasn't the kind of thing you got when the man you loved didn't just die - he was obliterated. 

All  _ Eliot  _ had was a memory of cowardice. A flash of what he prayed was hope in a short-lived freedom. And something he wished he could forget. 

It was right after he'd returned to his body. Right after cooperative magic and Margo's insane desert axes saved his life and almost ended it. Margo was the sweetest thing he could have hoped to see in that moment. Her saving him, it was the image he was clinging to for however long he was trapped inside his own mind. She was everything, everything, everything. His Bambi had saved him. What he hadn't dared to hope for, though, that surprised him. His eyes shifted, just past Margo's shoulder, and there he was. Right there. Almost within reach, if he had any abdominal muscles left to speak of. 

Fierce, determined, inimitable Q. Tutting like the world depended on it. Tutting like it was the last thing he would ever do. Both were true, as it turned out. 

Eliot remembered looking, staring, drinking in the sight of him. It was equal parts heartbreaking and life-affirming. The kind of feeling that started somewhere beneath the giant gash in his stomach and grew, glowing and brilliant, until he felt like it was pouring out of every piece of him. The kind of thing he assumed all the Renaissance writers were on about all those years.

_ Peaches and plums. Let's try again.  _

It was there, stuck somewhere in the back of his throat. He was sure it would burst out of him if only Quentin would look over at him.

But he never did. Whatever ancient, unstoppable essence the monster was made of after the axe slashed through him filtered into the bottle and Quentin capped it, grabbed it, lightning-fast. His jaw was set. He hiked the strap of the bottle over his shoulder. Penny popped in. Quentin nodded. The muscle just below his temple flexed, restrained. So much restraint. Then they were gone and the vignette of Eliot's vision faded to black. When he woke up, Q was gone. 

Hopeless. 

He didn't want to tell Margo that this was hopeless. After everything she'd done to save him. After everything she was still doing to try and bring him back from yet another brink. She deserved to know he wasn't giving up. But hopeless was the only thing he felt. It was a hungry, vicious void inside of him that refused to be sated. It wanted only to consume everything inside of him, everything around him, until he existed in a black hole that felt as insistently, pervasively empty as the hopelessness itself. Empty, he thought, might be better. 

He returned to the fire, ignoring the flickering against Margo's sorrow-lined face and how familiar it looked. Ignored the phantom fuzz of a fucking stone fruit in his fingertips as he sat down beside her. 

"I'm not giving up," Margo said, resolute. 

When they were first years, there was a night, basked in the warmth of red wine and before apocalypse was their baseline state of existence, when Margo looked up at him, her head in his lap, and smiled. Eliot had asked what dirty things she was dreaming up, and Margo had laughed, a softer laugh than he'd ever heard out of his sharp-edged Bambi. "I think I need you," she'd said. At the time, he'd grinned back and waved a hand in the air for vague emphasis. "Of course you do. I'm fucking fabulous," he'd quipped back. But he'd never understood why she said that. Margo fought for what she wanted. He was fairly certain he'd never been resolute about anything other than ascots and alcohol. Eliot needed Margo far more than Margo needed Eliot, from where he stood. 

"I know," he said finally, shoving away the memory as the crackling of the fire reminded him they weren’t in the Physical Kids’ Cottage. They weren’t lying on the floor in a too-damp forest. They were here, now, in a reality he was ready to forget. 

His muscles were starting to loosen up, his thoughts slipping through the spaces in his mind that the mushrooms created. He was moments away from losing himself in the sway of the fire or the rustle of the leaves on the trees just beyond it. He needed the escape, needed to feel  _ fine  _ again. But he could give Margo something before he slipped into sweet, sweet oblivion. He wanted to. Needed to. Hopelessness wouldn't stop tugging at his ankles, grasping at his wrists and beckoning him into its dark embrace. But if he couldn't fulfill his promise the way he had intended, maybe he could get somewhere close. If Margo needed him, maybe he could, for once, let himself be needed. 

_ Be braver.  _

"We'll find a way," he said. Margo slid her hand over to cover one of his, and maybe it was the mushrooms slowly leeching away his pain and replacing it with a technicolor version of the wind and the sky, but there was something about the way she squeezed his fingers that said he'd finally done something right. 

It wasn't enough, but it could be enough for now. 


End file.
